Autofiction, Time Travel, and Pandemics: An Exclusive Guest Post From Emily St. John Mandel, Author of Sea of Tranquility, Our April Book Club Pick

By Emily St. John Mandel / April 5, 2022 at 5:03 am

Hardcover $19.99 ~~$25.00~~

Sea of Tranquility (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)

Hardcover $19.99 ~~$25.00~~

For a story filled with time travel, love, and humanity, you won’t want to miss Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility. This book spans 300 years and follows an exiled son of an earl, an author on a book tour trapped on earth during a pandemic, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts alongside his childhood best friend who have both seen the opportunity to do something great that would change the fabric of the timeline of the universe. Here, Emily gives us a glimpse into her life as an author as well as the inspiration behind the time-travel aspects of her latest novel.

I think of my new novel, Sea of Tranquility, as forming a kind of triptych with two previous novels, Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. Even though they all stand on their own and they’re not all the same genre—Station Eleven was largely post-apocalyptic, while The Glass Hotel was set in more or less the present day and was about ghosts and white-collar crime—they share common themes and ideas that I find myself returning to again and again—themes of travel, art, music, and what it means to live an honourable life. And readers will find that two characters from Station Eleven appear in The Glass Hotel, and several characters from The Glass Hotel appear in Sea of Tranquility.

This new novel has a time travel element that came about because I really like time travel fiction. Looper is one of my favourite movies. But the problem with time travel narratives is that they generally fall apart if you look at them too closely because, doesn’t any time travel inevitably create a loop? The only way I could make sense of a time travel narrative was by adding another variable: the simulation hypothesis, which is the idea that we’re possibly living in a simulation. That allowed me to both gloss over and acknowledge the problem with time travel narratives. In Sea of Tranquility, a character in the year 2400 says “We think we’re living in a simulation because time travel works better than it should,” or words to that effect.

One of the main characters in Sea of Tranquility is an author living on a moon colony who visits Earth on a book tour. I started working on autofiction about an author on a long book tour a few months before the pandemic, back in late 2019. I’d wanted to write about the book tour experience for a while and I’d found autofiction to be kind of an interesting exercise but thought it might be just that—a writing exercise—and wasn’t sure I’d do anything with it. Then the pandemic hit, and an interesting way to write about the awfulness of the early pandemic was to map a pandemic on to the autofiction. At the same time, a much-needed way to get out of my neighbourhood during lockdown was to set that autofiction a) in the distant future and b) on the moon, which is to say as far away from my apartment as humanly possible.

Sea of Tranquility is a novel written mostly during the pandemic and the kind of book that happens when you’re working in a soundscape of constant ambulance sirens. I am grateful that I was able to travel into these pages at times when I really needed that escape. I am also very grateful for the extraordinary experience of seeing Station Eleven adapted for screen. Because of Covid, I wasn’t able to visit the set, which means I never saw behind the scenes, and I got to experience the show the same way most other people did, by watching the final version. I love what Patrick Somerville and his colleagues did. The show differs significantly from the book, but all the changes make sense to me. It has been wonderful to hear from fans of the book who loved the series.

I so look forward to hearing what my readers think of this new novel.